1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a language teaching aid. More particularly, it relates to a series of materials for teaching young children to read, pronounce, and write Chinese characters and to a method for using the materials in an order consistent with young children's cognitive developmental trajectory.
2. Description of Related Art
Learning Chinese characters may be difficult for some young children because the single-color printed word appearing on a page does not appear particularly attractive or interesting to them. If a child finds black letters written on a white page to be uninteresting, his or her Chinese skills will develop very slowly and perhaps not at all. For children trying to learn Chinese in an environment where Chinese is not the native language, it is even more difficult to master Chinese.
The way children enjoy and utilize stimuli such as colors, drawings, animations, musicals, and stories develops by stages. That is, when they are just born, at their Sensory Motor Period, infants are limited to viewing and listening to the stimuli. Starting at around age two, at their Preconceptual Period, children like to colorize objects, and draw lines and circles. Starting at around age four, at their Intuition Period, they may begin to logically connect objects such as Chinese characters with each other. Starting at around age seven, children can perform classification and can comprehend principles such as the principle that a pictophonetic character is built with two elements, one element indicating meaning and the other indicating sound.
In all language systems, there are about one hundred basic words that occupy 50% of daily usage. In Chinese, these basic words may each be written in the form of characters. In a native linguistic environment, children learn and use the basic words or characters repeatedly, which provides a solid foundation for them to develop their native language.
To summarize, what is needed, then, is a method and material for teaching Chinese to young children that attracts and holds their interest, suits their developmental stage, and imitates the natural linguistic environment, to enable young children to master and retain the basic Chinese characters, especially if they live outside the native Chinese environment.